DLC #135 - Bioshock Infinite - Burial at Sea - Episode 1

After Clash in the Clouds, it was hard to believe they could make Bioshock Infinite any more challenging by going back to something more story-driven, and this turns out to be a fairly solid statement.

Burial at Sea - Episode 1 sees you return to Rapture, the underwater city setting from Bioshock 1 and 2. You're still playing as Booker DeWitt and you're tasked with saving an abducted girl called "Sally" on behalf of an older verison of Elizabeth who still accompanies you along the way. The details of her relevance and why you need to find her are kept purposely vague, and do become clearer by the end of the Episode.

The package blends Infinite and Bioshock vibes together. You have the same Plasmids and weapons from Infinite, but enemies are splicers, NPC's you see and hear within Audio Logs are all from Rapture, and you'll encounter a Big Daddy, all of which are synonymous with the Bioshock world.

The package contains 10 trophies in total, and is a much easier list than Clash in the Clouds.

There are 3 progression-based trophies awarded for reaching certain plot points in the very short episode, which clocks in at around 3-4 hours with maximum exploration.

The rest of the trophies can be obtained through various forms of combat. There are 2 new additions to the game via this Episode of DLC, in the form of Old Man Winter and Radar Range, and a further 5 of the trophies within this list are awarded for executing specific actions whilst using these 2 new combat methods.

Old Man Winter is a new plasmid that allows the player to freeze enemies and kill them by shattering their frozen body. It also acts as an environmental dynamic, allowing you to freeze water which can enable you to bridge gaps to both story areas and hidden areas. Radar Range is a new weapon which emits a beam of light that causes enemies to explode and can also cause splash damage to any enemies nearby. The requirements of all 5 trophies related to these new mechanics are very simple to achieve.

There is also the seemingly Bioshock token nod to Audio Logs, with a silver trophy accounted for, for collecting all 17 of these along the way. Some of them are locked within areas that you'll need lockpicks for, so that is something to be aware of, but you should find plenty if you scour the environment well enough, and failing that, Chapter Select is also back to save the day for any you might have missed to prevent you replaying the episode in it's entirety. 

There is also not a requirement to play though this DLC on any specific difficulty. I did choose to play on 1999 Mode, purely for the reason that, when I scoured the trophy list for the first time to scope it out, I made the assumption that 1 of the 3 hidden trophies was for beating the episode on 1999 Mode, and I'm not really in a position with this game to want to playthrough anything twice. This wasn't the case though, but the secret trophies are disjointed in the way they appear on the trophy list, which also threw my intuition off a bit, and gave me the impression that the isolated hidden trophy at the very bottom was not progression based, and was for beating the episode in 1999 mode.

It meant that I ran into a few complications with certain trophies, because I died a few times on some of the more hectic areas, and the price to revive as part of 1999 mode, just like it was the main game, meant that I didn't have enough money to upgrade Old Man Winter twice for the "Fully Equipped" trophy, awarded for Purchasing any two upgrades for Old Man Winter or Radar Range in Burial at Sea - Episode 1. I was able to load an earlier chapter via Chapter Select and continue my progress whilst accumulating enough money to just unlock it for the trophy though.

Even with this slight hiccup, this was still all wrapped up within 3-4 hours. It's a very casual experience in comparison to Clash in the Clouds, and that was even going through it in 1999 Mode, which you don't even need to do to earn all 10 trophies.

Platinum #103 - Grand Theft Auto V

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 9/10

This review was never meant to exist. The game was condemned to be forever "unachievable" as the first ever in my entire collection that became impossible to obtain 100% of all trophies.

I had come to terms with the fact this just wasn't meant to be, and for someone who has always aspired to trophy hunting as a completionist, it was a tough one to accept. However, there were still ways, and I had to just cling onto that hope knowing if luck played it's part, things could align.

That it did and here we are. Talking about Grand Theft Auto V, physically represented by a Platinum trophy, rather than talking about it as a "What if?". It's an even sweeter feeling when you consider how roller-coaster this journey is from start to finish, so let's begin. There's much to talk about.

Grand Theft Auto V, for the first time, sees you take control of 3 different characters. Franklin Clinton, Michael De Santa and Trevor Phillips. The plot revolves around a previously botched Heist job where Michael and Trevor are initially acquainted. Michael is alleged to have been killed at the scene by police and Trevor escapes, only for it be revealed that Michael actually also escaped and is placed under an unofficial witness protection scheme, relocated under a new identity with his family and allowed to live as a free man, for reasons which become apparent later, but won't be revealed here in the name of keeping things spoiler free. 

Michael starts life anew in Los Santos, and ends up getting acquainted with Franklin when he catches him trying to steal his car, but when they accidentally destroy the house of wealthy gangster, Martin Madrazo, they have to find a way to pay him back. This gets Michael back into his old line of business, pulling heists, to raise the funds and appease Madrazo. This starts the slippery slope, and as with any classic Grand Theft Auto plot, you end up working for a large selection of different and crooked characters looking to take advantage of some increasingly dire straits, which become even more dire as a consequence, and this in turn becomes cyclical as more plot twists develop along the way.

Trevor is introduced into the story part way through when he makes the discovery that Michael is not dead, and tracks him down within Los Santos. Franklin, by this point, has become somewhat an understudy to Michael and his criminal tendencies.

The game lends to this Multi-character angle really well, with a variety of different missions bounced between the 3 characters, along with a handful of missions where you switch between all of them to play out the various roles required to complete the job, which really comes to the fore when you go through the story heists and other big set piece missions.

The trophy list is large, clocking in at a total of 51 trophies, and is split between Single Player and Multiplayer. It follows the same sort of blueprint as Grand Theft Auto 4, with a lot of obvious similarities between both games, but this list does create some fresh challenges which do end up being significant differences.

We'll start with the Single Player side of this list first, and the main focus will be going through the game's 69 main story missions following the previously outlined plot above through to the very end, whilst undertaking a broad range of side activities which will also contribute towards 100% completion of the game.

The "To Live or Die in Los Santos" trophy, awarded for Completing the final mission, caps the main story off and is awarded upon finishing the 69th mission. The standard requirements of merely beating the game are not really that challenging though. You can respawn within missions an infinite amount of times until you beat them, and checkpoints are also quite generous. There also isn't a difficulty preset, though I did personally opt to change the controls from the traditional GTA headshot aim-assist to free-aim mode, in order to add some balance to the difficulty element, but still found it a relatively casual experience.

There are 11 progression based trophies including this one, and these are split fairly evenly between the game's 2 main focal points, which include both traditional story missions and Heists, which frequently pop up as a way of integrating Michael and Trevor's past into the current story.

The "Career Criminal" trophy, awarded for Attaining 100% Game Completion, is where one of the obvious similarities to GTA 4 can be drawn. Thankfully, there were no dramas with the journey towards 100% this time round, unlike GTA4, but there is alot of additional effort required for getting this extra mileage out of the game.

Aside from the 69 main story missions, you'll need to beat a series of other requirements, including races, parachute jumps, stunt jumps, Stranger and Freak side missions and a whole host of collectibles, aswell as various other activities. So there's a good mixture of new and old, and the trophy list covers many of these requirements with their own individual trophies to spur you along.

Some of these activities can be challenging, but mostly exist to prolong the game, and going for 100% will do exactly this, mainly in thanks to some very collectible-heavy requirements, which are worth mentioning collectively purely for their sheer volume, and even though the 100% checklist doesn't require you to collect all of them in some instances, there are individual trophies awarded for that instead, so you'll still need all of them regardless of what the 100% requirement asks of you. The collectibles include 50 Letter Scraps, 50 Spaceship Parts, 30 Submarine Parts and 30 Nuclear Waste Barrels. There are also vehicular-based collectibles, including 50 Stunt Jumps, 50 Under the Bridge and 15 Knife Flights, and expect all of this to contribute heavily towards the overall completion time of the list.

I also found some slight irritation within some of these collectibles, notably Stunt Jumps, that don't always seem to register properly, causing you to unjustly retry them, and Under the Bridge, which includes a few bridges that need a specifically small chopper to navigate underneath, and cannot be done with just any standard sized chopper. Some of the other collectibles are also positioned within awkward places and, as a general observation, require you to trawl across every single corner of the map.

The "Close Shave" trophy, awarded for Completing all Under the Bridge and Knife Flight challenges, is one of those aforementioned instances where there are part-requirements for 100%, but full completion required for the trophy, and these are the hardest tasks within the Single Player game. This is mainly down to the certain level of mastery required with air-based vehicles, which needs to be of a fairly high standard for the required tasks here, especially the Knife Flights.

The Under the Bridge part of this trophy isn't too bad, though, as just touched upon above, you will need a specific helicopter to fit under certain bridge gaps that are too narrow for a traditional helicopter to fit between, but the Knife Flights are a different beast. These require you to glide a plane sideways between a gap, usually consisting of 2 buildings, and make it through the other side unscathed. 

You can get some practice executing Knife Flights through the training school, completion of which is a 100% requirement under Hobbies and Pastimes, but these don't really prepare you for the eventuality of having to guide a plane through some very tight gaps. The general recommendation is to use the fighter jet, due to it's compact size, but I actually found Trevor's seaplane to be a sound option. It's slow and easier to handle as a consequence, but I used up a good chunk of time on this trophy, most of which is spent watching loading screens after you've clipped a skyscraper and wasted yourself. It's the hardest individual trophy contained within this series of mini-tasks that make up the 100% checklist, and does require some genuine skill, even though there are only 15 Knife Flights.

The "Solid Gold, Baby!" trophy, awarded for Earning any 70 Gold Medals on Missions, Strangers and Freaks, adds yet another layer on top of the Single Player experience, requiring the player to score a Gold medal on any 70 missions across the game. This is one of the new elements introduced to the trophy list that did not exist within GTA 4 (nor Red Dead Redemption for that matter), but would go on to feature within the Red Dead Redemption 2 trophy list.

Every Story mission will rate the players performance based on certain objectives, which are only originally revealed upon beating the mission for the first time. You'll get either a Bronze, Silver or Gold medal depending on how many of the extra objectives you manage to fulfill, and these do add the extra element of challenge the regular game lacks. When you include the Stranger and Freaks missions as part of this trophy, you do have some flexibility to pick and choose, and I would also recommend some of the Stranger and Freaks missions that do NOT contribute to 100% completion, but will still provide additional options for this trophy. It would be tempting to miss some of these out because they won't fulfill your 100% obligations, but Stranger and Freaks missions are good ways to pad this total of 70 because they are generally shorter and easier to get Gold medals on in comparison to main story missions.

If you were to Gold medal every single Story mission, you would still be 1 short of this requirement anyway, and some of the main Story missions can take anywhere between 20-30 minutes, and that's potentially alot of rework, especially if you still don't manage to meet the Gold requirements after playing through them again, something which is only known upon clearing the mission, and therefore certainly something to consider when you're tactfully making your choices.

I managed to get through most missions without too much struggle, but as the field of scope gets more narrow, I did have to bite the bullet and tackle a handful of challenging missions within the last 10-15 in order to get this trophy, so it did create a slight uplift in difficulty, as well as a greater investment of time on top of this. It is frustrating to go through a lengthy mission and still miss an objective or two, though it is important to mention that you don't need to fulfill any objective you have already achieved, so you can go into some missions where you maybe only need 1 or 2 objectives. I only had 14 Gold medals across both Story and Strangers and Freaks missions by the time I had finished everything once, so there was a lot of extra time required post-game to oblige to the requirements of this trophy too, which has to be taken into account also.

The statistics screen within the 100% checklist breaks down your play time between all 3 characters, and this reads a collective total of 79 hours for me, which is probably about standard for a Rockstar open world game, but still a pretty hefty portion of time for any Single Player experience that doesn't insist on multiple playthroughs or tons of repetition.

However, the Multiplayer portion of this list is a completely different beast and I just want to caveat this with a couple of general notes before I touch on specific trophies.

Firstly, the Playstation 3 version of this game is plagued with cheaters and modded lobbies, which can seriously impact your progress, both positively and negatively, all of which is completely out of your control and depends on who you run into. Trophies aside, it makes for a bad gaming experience, compounded further by the level of dedication required to earn all of the trophies. Ironically enough though, it was an integral part to me achieving a particular trophy which would otherwise be unobtainable, so it seems strange to be critical, though still wholly warranted.

Secondly, the Multiplayer design choices leave a lot to be desired. You have to navigate though too many pre-game menus, lobbies have far too much dead time between matches and the general feel is one that is clunky, does not flow well at all and constantly under-performs with bad stability issues. It leads to a seriously heavy grind, and ultimately is not really an enjoyable experience, and there is a reasonable amount of dedication towards the online portion of this game within the trophy list.

The "Above the Law" trophy, awarded for Reaching Rank 100, is the fairly typical level-based venture Rockstar trophy lists are known for, and this is a toughly chosen winner for the most difficult trophy in this list.

It requires 1,500,000 experience points to achieve level 100. If this seems like a lot, then that's because it is. I would generally target myself to achieve 1-2 levels per day playing the game for anywhere between 2-6 hours, which would be dependent on various factors such as activity levels of other players to play against, server stability and individual performance. Some days would go quite smoothly with a nice flow of games played with a reasonable amount of players, and other days would just be broken up by unstable lobbies and would feel unproductive, especially if my performance was bad. It was a real mixed bag.

Experience is earned by winning matches and completing in-game challenges, though one of the logistic challenges is the fact that experience gain is based mostly on the number of players you're competing against. For example, if you win a race in a lobby of 8 players, you'll pick up much greater rewards than if you were to win a race in a lobby of 3 players, and having played through much of this journey at a time where this game had a version available on Playstation 4 that isn't plagued by hackers, this seriously impacted the community volumes and it was rare to even get half-full lobbies the majority of the time, so experience gains always felt slower.

Despite there being a whole host of game modes available, I mostly stuck to Deathmatch and races. Deathmatches because custom made levels can net you some very good experience if you play 15-20 minute variants, and races because you can finish them relatively quickly and get into a nice flow if you can keep an active lobby going, but these are both best case scenarios. The additional experience awarded for killing opponents in Deathmatch mode separate to the end-game experience is also an important touch to mention, and although I won't address it on it's own merits, there is also a trophy for earning 30 Platinum medals, and these are also an effective way to accrue experience points on the way towards level 100.

Each category is tiered from Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum and awards a new amount of experience for each tier. When you include the Heists DLC, which comes with it's own new set of medals, you have many to go after and it's worth keeping tabs and working on them because they will give you those incremental step gains that are good for motivational reasons, as well as general progress. 

My overall completion time to reach level 100 was a whopping 8 days and 17 hours, which converts into a grand total of 209 hours, and the predominant reason as to why this is the greatest challenge of this whole list. It is a shame that many of these challenges that exist, and have been mentioned here, were born through negligence of care to the game, and could have been addressed if the desire was there for the developers to do so. It makes for a tough online leveling journey, and one of the most challenging I've ever completed.

The "Run Like The Wind" trophy, awarded for Surviving with a Bounty on your head, is the sole trophy that effectively made this Platinum make or break.

Just for the purpose of background, I was always fully aware of the fact that, if I ever wanted to resume with Grand Theft Auto 5, there was a distinct possibility I could never have the Platinum, and it was specifically down to this trophy. In my mind, I had 2 options. 

One of those options was to accept that I could just be wasting my time, effectively give up, and move on. The other option was to commit to just keep plugging away, knowing that there was a way for me to fortunately stumble upon a chance to still achieve this trophy, long after it had officially become technically unachievable. If there was never a chance, I would never have carried on.

The bounty feature within Grand Theft Auto Online allows any player to place a bounty on another players head within a public lobby, which would then allow others players to earn that bounty by killing the player in question. When hackers grew to prominence within this community, one of the ways they'd transfer large sums of cash among themselves, was via the bounty system, which prompted Rockstar to permanently disabled this feature, for it to never return. The catch is, hackers can still access this feature and place bounties on other players anyway, which is where the slim hope I was clinging onto came from.

I knew the leveling journey was a long one ahead of time, and methodically, I also knew that, due to the amount of time I was anticipating to spend with this game, this would potentially be long enough to luck out and get this trophy before I managed to hit level 100, and it eventually happened. A hacker in a random public lobby planted a bounty on me and I knew exactly what to do to earn the trophy, which was to just flee and hide in my safe house without dying for the required 40 minutes until achievement.

It's a very innocuous trophy, and has alot of notoriety attached to it within the trophy hunting community, but it ended up being the difference maker within the whole list.

The rest of the Multiplayer trophies can be earned either naturally, or just by slightly going out of your way within free-roam. There are 3 other trophies awarded every 25 levels up before you hit level 100, so there is a little bit of progressive motivation, and the rest are just smaller tasks that pale in comparison to the greater challenges ahead. You do need to be prepared to stick out a bad experience though, and I don't even think that's down to a matter of opinion.

When I look back, and realise that I gave Grand Theft Auto 4 a 10/10, I feel like I would be underselling the Grand Theft Auto 5 experience by not giving it a similar rating. Grand Theft Auto 4, whilst not too dissimilar in the nature of it's trophy list, contained heightened challenges that fully justified its rating at the time. I had to play through the entire Single Player game to 100% completion 3 separate times and it contained an online experience that required you to play well co-operatively with other players, which was also very grindy and ultimately born out a lot of complications that became frustrating factors.

I wouldn't say I had the same level of frustrations with this list but I have put almost 300 hours into it, and from my own memory, I don't recall ever having to mention that I had almost exceeded such a time-frame for any game I've previously finished. There isn't as big of a skill element required compared to Grand Theft Auto 4, and for the amount of time I spent with the game, it was mostly down to steadily progressing through to level 100 and picking up the other online trophies along the way.

The Single Player portion of the list is mostly an enjoyable experience, with a couple of good challenges, but mostly about playing through the main story and finishing up the side activities, with some added repeatability from the Gold medal requirements. The Multiplayer is a greater test of patience, and where it can be interesting in doses, the badly designed menus and lobbies, along with a diminishing online community full of hackers leaves a bitter taste. The Heists DLC pack was the highlight of this overall journey though, and contributed some added uplift to a dour leveling grind.

It's not quite a 10/10 though. If it had that added skill challenge that was present in some of the trophies Grand Theft Auto 4 had, then it would be, and there's no doubt that the state of the Multiplayer landscape creates a lot of extra difficulties that won't be present on the Playstation 4 version of the game. The amount of time it's taken me to achieve this Platinum can't be overlooked, and that is absolutely accounted for within the final rating. All of the games I've given 10/10 to have at least something in them that fronts up a strong element of skill, which isn't quite present here, but given the fact this review wasn't even meant to be exist, it's fair to say we've come a long way to reach this point.

Notable Trophies -

To Live or Die in Los Santos - Completed the final mission.
Career Criminal - Attain 100% Game Completion.
Close Shave - Complete all Under the Bridge and Knife Flight challenges.
Solid Gold, Baby! - Earn any 70 Gold Medals on Missions, Strangers and Freaks.
Above the Law - GTA Online : Reach Rank 100.
Run Like The Wind - GTA Online - Survive with a Bounty on your head.

Hardest Trophy -

Above the Law
GTA Online : Reach Rank 100